Ulysses

"The Adventures of Ulysses" Bernard Evslin Ulysses is a Greek sea captain and hero. This is one of his adventures. The Greeks are out of food and land on a place called Lotus Land. The Greek god of sleep, Morpheus, plants the lotus flowers for the natives by mixing bright colors into dreams. When Ulysses and his men land, they are so tired they fall asleep and the natives put flowers around them. When they awake the men eat them. Morpheus checks on their dreams. The men's dreams are of war and death.

James Joyce fans know that June 16 is Bloomsday, the single day in which all of his seminal novel "Ulysses" takes place. But as the video above reveals in its first seconds, not everyone is a James Joyce fan. It's the trailer for the documentary "Get in Bed with Ulysses," which is screening this Bloomsday at several Southern California locations. The film -- made by Joyce fans Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna -- is a fascinating, human look at the author and "Ulysses," his most famous novel.

To lovers of James Joyce and Irish literature, June 16 has a special significance. It's known as Bloomsday, named for Leopold Bloom, the main character in Joyce's "Ulysses. " The notoriously challenging novel blasted through formal conventions and become an iconic work of modernist fiction; its 600-plus pages take place in Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904. And on Saturday, Angelenos can celebrate the occasion by attending dramatic readings, listening to Irish music and naturally raising a glass of Guinness.

What if you had experienced the defining moment of your life - but couldn't remember it? Sharr White's remarkable two-person play, “Annapurna,” now at the Odyssey, deals with just that dilemma, as well as other imponderables such as the vagaries of love and the philosophical clarity of impending death. From White's poignant script to Bart DeLorenzo's faultless direction to Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman's beautifully centered performances, “Annapurna” is a lovely theatrical construct from the ground up. PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage The production's slice-of-life specificity begins with Thomas A. Walsh's scenic design, a squalid trailer in the Colorado foothills bespeaking hopelessness in every filthy detail. The magnificent Rockies, looming just outside, stand in ironic counterpoint to this “purgatory,” a sort of sick animal's burrow where once-celebrated poet Ulysses (Offerman)

James Joyce fans know that June 16 is Bloomsday, the single day in which all of his seminal novel "Ulysses" takes place. But as the video above reveals in its first seconds, not everyone is a James Joyce fan. It's the trailer for the documentary "Get in Bed with Ulysses," which is screening this Bloomsday at several Southern California locations. The film -- made by Joyce fans Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna -- is a fascinating, human look at the author and "Ulysses," his most famous novel.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Wednesday, people around the world will gather in libraries and theaters, pubs and restaurants, streets and squares to commemorate a precise set of events that included the preceding snatch of conversation and that occurred between daybreak and midnight in a provincial European city on June 16, 1904 — events they know full well never happened. This, of course, is Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the 20th century's greatest novel, "Ulysses," and of the genius of its author, the Irishman James Joyce.

Ulysses, the mission to study the sun's poles and the influence of our star on surrounding space, is coming to an end. After more than 17 years in space -- almost four times its originally expected lifetime -- the mission is succumbing to its harsh environment and is likely to finish sometime in the next month or two, astronomers said Friday. A joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA, Ulysses was launched in 1990 from a space shuttle. Ulysses is in a six-year orbit around the sun. Its long path through space carries it out to Jupiter's orbit and back again.

A plutonium-powered satellite that will be launched from the shuttle Discovery this fall to explore the sun's poles poses little health risk in the event of an accident, space officials said last week. Ulysses' scientific instruments will be powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity.

A five-year voyage by an unmanned spacecraft set for launching next May will give scientists their first look at the "unexplored regions of the sun" when it leaps out of the ecliptic plane in which the planets travel and soars around the sun's polar regions. "The sun does strange things (in its polar regions)," David Bohlin, project scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told scientists attending the national convention of the American Geophysical Union here on Monday.

Milo O'Shea, a versatile Dublin-born stage and screen actor known for his famously bristling, agile eyebrows and roles in such disparate films as "Ulysses," "Barbarella" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet," has died. He was 86. O'Shea, who also appeared in many popular television series, including "Cheers," "Frasier," "The West Wing" and "The Golden Girls," died Tuesday in New York after a short illness, according to Irish news accounts. Familiar both in starring and supporting roles, he appeared in numerous stage productions before coming to wider attention with his first leading screen role as Leopold Bloom in the 1967 adaptation of James Joyce's "Ulysses.

To lovers of James Joyce and Irish literature, June 16 has a special significance. It's known as Bloomsday, named for Leopold Bloom, the main character in Joyce's "Ulysses. " The notoriously challenging novel blasted through formal conventions and become an iconic work of modernist fiction; its 600-plus pages take place in Dublin over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904. And on Saturday, Angelenos can celebrate the occasion by attending dramatic readings, listening to Irish music and naturally raising a glass of Guinness.

A Disposition to Be Rich How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States Geoffrey C. Ward Alfred A. Knopf: 415 pp., $28.95. In 1863, the young Ferdinand Ward was alone with his mother in their parsonage in Geneseo, N.Y., his minister father and older brother both off to war and his older sister visiting relatives out of town. Diphtheria swept through the village, killing friends and neighbors, and each mail delivery carried the risk of disaster - would it include a notice that one of the Ward men had been killed?

Often started, seldom finished. That's the knock on James Joyce's "Ulysses. " Everyone knows Buck Mulligan is "stately" and "plump," but by the time Stephen Dedalus' allusive stream of consciousness gives way to Leopold Bloom's humanist point of view in the fourth chapter, many readers have given up. Too long. Too wordy. Too confusing. However, for those who have tried to read "Ulysses" but were unable to finish (or thought about it and said they did), two new books offer something of a corrective.

An American Type A Novel Henry Roth W.W. Norton: 284 pp., $25.95 All novelists, despite the façade of fiction, are ultimately writing variations of their own stories. Surely their characters provide necessary cover, but there's always autobiography and memoir yelping in the background — "it's all true, the names have changed, but the emotions and memories are dead-on." Henry Roth, the first of the great Jewish American novelists of the 20th century, never concealed the background that shaped him or the emotions that often left him guilt-ridden and paralyzed.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Wednesday, people around the world will gather in libraries and theaters, pubs and restaurants, streets and squares to commemorate a precise set of events that included the preceding snatch of conversation and that occurred between daybreak and midnight in a provincial European city on June 16, 1904 — events they know full well never happened. This, of course, is Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the 20th century's greatest novel, "Ulysses," and of the genius of its author, the Irishman James Joyce.

After finishing the first chapter of Ulysses and embarking on the rest of the book, Karen Kenyon, author of "Joyce's Dublin" (May 7), will find that the novel offers many interesting spots worth visiting in and around the Dublin area. In fact, all of James Joyce's novels can be used as tour guides of turn-of-the-century Dublin. City parks, universities, pubs, libraries and government buildings discussed in the novels are still in existence, and visiting them brings an interesting life to the masterpieces in which they are featured.

George F. Will--you really want to know what causes me to blush? Your middle initial for one thing. Please change it. It is offensive. Passages from "Song of Solomon" also make me blush, as do passages from Joyce's "Ulysses." Years back, distinguished pseudo-sophisticates like yourself tried to suppress "Ulysses" and all they ever managed to do was give the book a legend to go along with its reputation as a masterpiece. And today, you, George F. Will, would like to fight porn rock.

Joseph Strick, an independent filmmaker who brought James Joyce's "Ulysses" to the big screen and won an Academy Award for best documentary short subject for "Interviews with My Lai Veterans," has died. He was 86. Strick died of congestive heart failure Tuesday in a hospital in Paris, said his son, photographer David Strick. FOR THE RECORD: Joseph Strick: The obituary of filmmaker Joseph Strick in Friday's LATExtra section said he was survived by five grandchildren.

Shame on the 14 Republican congressmen who last week proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Their action suggests they need a history lesson about the Northern general who won the Civil War and went on to lead the country. Having enjoyed brief acclaim during the Mexican-American War, the onetime farmer was toiling in obscurity when he answered President Lincoln's call for volunteers in 1861. He rapidly won fame in the Western theater, scoring decisive and morale-raising victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga.